Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Mixxx is free, open source software for performing live DJ mixes. Developed by a diverse community of DJs, Mixxx is a complete replacement for a conventional "turntables and mixer" DJ setup, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

This new release includes a year's worth of contributions from over 30 developers and artists, and is our most exciting release to date. Mixxx 1.8.0 includes much anticipated features such as looping, hot cues, support for multiple MIDI devices, and a brand new database-powered library.

Since Mixxx 1.7.2 was released, the following changes have been made:

Looping

Loop-in, Loop-out, and Reloop/Exit buttons added to our main skins.

Loop point indicators on main waveforms and waveform summary displays.

Hot cues

Most of our skins gained 4 hot cue buttons, and Mixxx now internally supports up to 32 hot cues per deck.

A brand new database-powered library, with:

iTunes library and playlists access (Windows and Mac OS X)

Rhythmbox library and playlists access (Linux)

A brand new, faster library scanner

Crates!

A simple Auto DJ mode, which crossfades to the next track in the Auto DJ queue.

Analyze view, which allows you to run bulk BPM detection on your songs

We have great news for Ubuntu users: Mixxx 1.8.0 is avaiable in Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) directly from the Ubuntu Software Center! We also have a PPA containing Mixxx 1.8.0 for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) users, accessible from our downloads page.

Audio Playback Plugins

We've also added an audio playback plugin architecture to Mixxx, which allows Mixxx to playback extra formats with third-party plugins. Since audio formats like M4A/AAC are encumbered by software patents which restrict distribution and usage in certain jurisdictions, Mixxx cannot natively support them. However, the good news is that a licensed third-party can now develop and distribute an M4A plugin for Mixxx. We'll be posting some of our own audio plugins to the Mixxx Add-ons wiki page in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back again soon.

Fundraiser

We realized in the course of packaging 1.8.0 (by hand) that since we're planning on speeding up our release cycles, now might time to purchase a dedicated build server that will allow us to create nightly builds and automate our releases. Money raised will go to cover the cost of the server, and any leftover money will cover other ongoing expenses like web hosting, and otherwise help keep Mixxx rocking!

Bugs

We depend on feedback from our users to guide Mixxx's development, so let us know what you think of the new release! Also, please remember to report any bugs you discover to the Mixxx bug tracker.

Join Mixxx!

We're always looking for new contributors who are interested in working on Mixxx. If you're a programmer or artist and want to work with a creative, enthusiastic team, hop on our IRC channel (#mixxx on Freenode) or sign up for our developers' mailing list.

I use a PowerBook (PPC G4, Mac OS 10.5) as my DJing machine, and I know quite a few other DJs that use iBooks and PowerBooks (some cause they want too, others, like me, cause its all we have). By ending all PPC support you have forced me to switch to a paid application. When Apple stopped making PPC software when at least a third of the Macs still in use are PPC, I thought OSS would fill in the gaps, I guess I was wrong....It has been nice using your software, if/when I get a new Mac I may come back and try it out....

Thanks for the kind words! We're working on a 1.8.1 release which will improve performance for users who are experiencing glitches on track loads, among other bug fixes.

DJ Slave: Two of our developers spent over a week just trying to build a Mac OS X Universal binary for Mixxx 1.8 based on the procedure we had followed for 1.7.2. We were left with a bunch of problems and we didn't know how long they were going to fix, so we released Mixxx 1.8.0 without a PPC version because it was the last thing we had to do, and it was holding up the release.

I estimate that less than 5% of our users are on PPC for Mac, and I'm not willing at this time to try building a PPC version because it might take me two weeks of fiddling to make it work. I have no idea how much time it's going to take, and I have to justify stopping work on Mixxx 1.8.1 and 1.9 (which will benefit the other 95% of Mixxx users) while I work on the PPC version.

A compromise I thought of yesterday was that if we were to invest the time into building Mixxx for Mac OS X PPC (I emphasize that this is a legacy platform), we could make the PPC version available for some small fee, say $7.50. This allows the PPC version to benefit the other 95% of Mixxx users because some of the money would go towards supporting general Mixxx development (eg. build server), and the remaining 5% of users would get their PPC build.

What are your thoughts on an arrangement like this? (Nothing is set in stone, it's just an idea, but what matters most on this feedback from users like you.)

Since I take it you'd be willing to beta test any Mac OS X PPC versions for us, please get in touch and send me an email at alberts [///at////] mixxx [///dot///] org.

I absolutely love this software and I've tried just about every DJ program on the market. Right now I'm running Mixxx on Windows 7 (although i plan on installing the new version of Ubuntu Studio when it ships. Can't beat a realtime kernel when it comes to audio) with an M-audio xponent and the responsiveness even beats the Torq program that ships with the xponent.

Unfortunately I'm running into a lot of audio quality bugs even when I set my latency higher (pops and skips and what not) using M-audio's ASIO drivers with Mixxx. I love this program and I hate to look a gift-horse in the mouth as they say but I simply can't use it until the audio bugs are worked out. Hopefully a switch to Ubuntu Studio will iron things out for me.

Really sorry about the PPC build. As Albert said, it was holding up the 1.8.0 release because none of us could get it working, so we released without it. If we were a proprietary software company, you would be out of luck. The power of open-source is that you can download the Mixxx source yourself and build it for your particular machine. Mixxx runs on PPC Linux and PPC OSX, you simply have to compile it. Our wiki has detailed instructions on how to compile Mixxx. See this page: http://mixxx.org/wiki/doku.php/compiling_on_os_x

Jman:

We will be releasing a version 1.8.1 very shortly to deal with some critical audio skipping bugs that were occuring when loading a track to a player. Can you describe your audio problems some more? Ideally in a bug report at http://bugs.launchpad.net/mixxx (the comments section of a blog post is not very conducive to bug-fixing :) ) and we can investigate your setup problems a little more.

I've upgraded my mixxx 1.7.2 on my ubuntu 10.04LTS to the latest version 1.8.1. This version is really nice. The problem is that every time I launch the new version of mixxx 1.8.1 the sounds from rhythmbox, flash videos will mute or stop producing sound. I think there's a bug in this version. I tried changing the sound preference but it doesn't fix the problem. Please fix this.

When you run Mixxx via the GNOME launcher, it tells the PulseAudio sound daemon (which handles audio for apps like Rhythmbox and Flash) to suspend itself. In our experience, this is necessary in order to get low latencies so that Mixxx feels responsive.

We'll keep our eyes on this problem though, in case anything changes in PulseAudio that allows us to have lower latencies.

I keep getting this error sign every time I try to use my music from iTunes. "'The file 'C:/Users/Captain Redbeard/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music/Deadmau5/Ghosts N Stuff - Single/01 Ghosts N Stuff.m4a' could not be loaded"